


Waiting

by writer_in_wonderland



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Depression, Gen, I Tried, I don't know what i'm writing about, maybe not an accurate depiction of depression, natasha loves steve in a motherly way, pay attention to the note at the beginning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-27
Updated: 2015-10-27
Packaged: 2018-04-28 08:28:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5085505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writer_in_wonderland/pseuds/writer_in_wonderland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve can't seem to find the will anymore...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting

**Author's Note:**

> Please don't hate me guys. This is my first Captain America fic and I really tried. I was super inspired by a post that detailed Steve Roger's depression. This may not be accurate at all because I nor anyone close to me has ever suffered from it. If mentions of depression or anxiety has any trigger effect on you, please do not read this fic.

The doctors couldn't come up with a diagnosis. The serum was supposed to fix him. Many faceless men and women in white coats give him orange pill bottles. Blue, green, red, striped red, white, and blue. Steve just flushes them down the toilet now. They had put him in this haze, where instead of blissfully putting him to sleep, he saw Bucky there sitting on his bed, smiling, wearing his dress uniform, getting off the bed and opening his arms for a hug. Steve had stumbled back and hit his head on the kitchen counter, knocking himself unconscious. 

After that he had refused to take anymore medication. He had laid in bed for days after that episode on his medication, just staring out his window to the Manhattan skyline. He had the impulse the sketch it, to just let the sad flowing lines create a feeling of nostalgia. The sketchbook was all the way in the living room though, so far for his lead body to walk. He was practically rooted to his bed. 

After day five Natasha had appeared out of the shadows, muttering and cursing in Russian. She is in plain clothes and her socks are quiet on the granite tile floors of Steve's bedroom. She walks around the bed, coming so that she can look down at him. His glazed over expression obviously displeasing to her as she frowns. 

She looks at the space he has left on the bed and folds herself into the small space he has left and faces him looking at the lines his face has acquired.  
"Oh Steve." She whispers to him, touching his face lightly with her fingertips. His eyes finally flit to her face. Surprisingly he did not find pity there, but acceptance in his choices. She takes his head and pulls it to her chest, kissing the top. He considers fighting it but there is simply just not enough energy in his body. She begins to mother him slightly, making him food, making sure he gets up just long enough to shower, and just talking to him in the dark of his apartment.Then when her voice would go raw, she would request Jarvis put on Steve’s preferred playlist. 

Slowly Steve got more manageable. He put himself into a routine and it got okay. The feelings never went away, never, but they did get more manageable. Steve refused to go back on the pills, but he let Natasha coach him and he’s convinced he did not run into Sam on accident. Therapy was helping slightly but his symptoms were still there in the base levels. 

He thinks Tony knows. Surprisingly, no matter what the media said, he and Stark would sometimes just sit alone on a balcony, not letting each other fall into the loneliness and solitude of their own mental hells, nothing said, maybe an offered cigarette here and there but no words exchanged between the pair. 

He thinks Tony maybe understands him better than any therapist or specialist assigned to work with him. Tony has gotten low enough to want to pull the trigger and Steve knows the feeling intimately, how the cool barrel would feel inside of his mouth, the bitter metallic tang of the gunpowder and the steel taste of the metal. He’s looked at his service pistol enough times to know the weight of it in his hands and how to twist so that it would press against the side of his head and how the tip would feel against his temple. These were just thoughts though and Tony told him how it really felt, his father’s old pistol in one hand and a bottle of bourbon in the other and how the mix of gunpowder and bourbon in his mouth had been the most freeing drug he had ever taken. 

“Pepper found me at my lowest” he says in the silence of their balcony. Steve nods in understanding and takes the offered cigarette. He sees the way they look at each other and knows the adoration Tony holds for her is always more than he says. “She’s a good lady. You’d be wise not to push her away.”  
Tony nods. “Yeah, sometimes it just isn’t in my control.” Steve looks out on the darkening city and takes a long drag of the cigarette, holding it and finally releasing it as his lungs start to burn. 

He knows the feeling. 

~*~  
Bucky isn't dead. 

Bucky is alive. 

HYDRA has been growing inside SHEILD for 70 years 

Steve looks at the empty bottle of pills on his nightstand. 

It would be so easy to request a refill, to just take a couple and float in an abyss of Bucky related memories for awhile. Jarvis begins to play a song over the intercom of his apartment.  
"I've alerted Ms. Romanoff to your distress Captain Rogers, she will be here shortly." 

She finds him staring at a wall, frame hunched and broken looking. A broken tinker toy soldier. She carefully wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, turning on the TV and carefully avoiding news broadcasts to focus more on a show about the Pacific Ocean. 

Natasha moves to the kitchen to prepare a meal for them both. Steve, endlessly blank just stares at the TV, thoughts running a mile a minute behind his vacant eyes. When Natasha touches his shoulder and he almost breaks her delicate bird like wrists, an ingrained muscle memory response. She doesn't make a sound and lets him realize where he is and what he is doing. He pulls his hands away like they are branding irons but the rapidly reddening skin of Natasha's wrists tells him that he has already left a mark. 

"Sorry." He hoarsely mumbles. She just rubs his arm comfortingly. They watch nature documentaries and infomercials late into the night. Steve never says a word and occasionally to fill the silence Natasha will talk about how the spokesperson's hair goes against the laws of physics with how it is gelled and maybe Steve smiles once or twice. 

When Natasha gives him the file Steve's heart drops. "You might not want to pull on that thread." She warns dangerously. He knows it's just her way of telling him to be careful. 

Steve searches, Sam his loyal and unwavering friend. Steve wonders sometimes in the couple minutes when he wakes up before Sam and he looks over at the dark skin man on the other bed in the room and why he has put up with Steve's shit for this long and why he hasn't left by now. 

Then Sam will wake up and catch his eyes, one gaze saying he knows that Steve was floundering in guilt and despair. "C'mon buddy, 6 hours and a trouble man soundtrack are waiting in the car." 

Steve rolls his eyes but he could never be more thankful that Sam Wilson had not so accidentally been pushed into his life. 

Natasha sends him cards from Clint's farm every once in awhile, sends a video or two through his phone. She smiles in every single video. He doesn't blame her for leaving. Everyone needs a break from the hells they have formed for themselves. The kids are Natasha's break. Sometimes he thinks that it is probably the only way she doesn't pull the trigger at night. Steve knows that the possibility of finding Bucky is the only way he doesn't pull the trigger at night. 

~*~  
Steve never really finds Bucky.

Not the whole Bucky. 

Not the Bucky that would look at him after a firefight and have this look of crazed wild, like he could go and conquer the world. The sacred realization that he could die and so could Steve and that everything was fleeting so why not do anything. 

The look in his eye is what changed. There was no crazed wildness, only waiting, calculated waiting. This Bucky looked at Steve through the SHEILD interrogation room with nothing but emptiness. 

Steve sees that now in the mirror. There is someone with tan skin, golden hair, an aquiline nose, a thin mouth, and strong build that stares back at him in the every morning. 

Natasha comes back eventually. She sees him broken again, the one toy she just can't quite fix. She climbs into his bed with him, facing him with a blank expression. She runs her fingers along the lines that are beginning to form in his face, smoothing them out gently. She feels wetness and the tears on his face and they are just another thing to be wiped, not to be pitied. 

They look back at each other. Natasha is a mirror, giving him only as much as he gives her. They are the same, so broken and so pulled down from the pedestals they were once upon. Now they are both the same amount of broken. They are a peculiar mix of agony. Not enough to kill themselves, but just enough to keep on trudging through mission after mission and maybe hope that a stray bullet eventually finds it's intended mark. 

When it's dark like this, Steve can still pretend that those noises outside are Brooklyn and that he's back inside his old apartment with the door that always sat slightly asymmetrical because the floor dipped and so you constantly had to kick it open. That the stove had remains of potato skin soup left on it, and that the mattress he laid upon was something that was almost 30 years old and held the impression of two people, one larger and broader than the other. The two impressions were so close that you could barely tell where one ended and the other began.

**Author's Note:**

> This work is not beta'd and therefore all mistakes are the author's. Comments and kudos are love :)


End file.
